There were things about it that I thought were much more polished than season one, but overall I felt like it wasn't as strong. I attribute it to two things. The first one is simple enough - although the character portrayals of Punisher and Elektra were very strong, they didn't have the same magic that Fisk/Kingpin had in season one. D'Onofrio really stole the show in season one, and that was made even more painfully obvious in the middle of season two.

The second issue is more difficult to explain, but the easiest way i can do it is to parallel it to a season one episode of Elementary called "Déjà Vu All Over Again". In that episode, Holmes and Watson end up working on two indepedent cases - Watson on a case where a woman disappears, and Holmes on a case from a year prior about a woman who was pushed in front of a train - something that the disappeared woman references in her goodbye video. For most of the episode they're working separately, but then there ends up being a piece of evidence that links the two cases together in a way that no one expected but made a lot of sense in retrospect. Thus, the separate energy and their separate efforts came together into a sharp singular focus that helped them figure out exactly what happened and why. It was a pretty brilliant episode.

Once Elektra was introduced, the second season of Daredevil split into two distinctly independent plots, and i found myself waiting for that moment when those two plots would come back together and unify like the Elementary episode did. But that moment never came. There was some token crossover between the two, but it was all glancing blows that ended up resulting in multiple characters and multiple threads that were fighting for equal weight and screen time with no real harmonization.

Not that it wasn't nice to see Foggy and Page have their own spotlight in a way that they didn't really have in season one; it's a double-edge sword, because from what i fuzzily remember in season one, they were pretty 'sidekicky' whose stories were only developed as a means of extending the development of Murdock, and that definitely wasn't true here. But without those threads coming together in the end, it felt like its sole purpose was to make Foggy and Page non-sidekicky and therefore it felt contrived.

Still, the season was pretty compelling, and will probably get another watch. I'll probably watch it again, and then go back and watch season one again only after, because otherwise i probably won't enjoy season two as much.